In Understanding Alan Bennett, Peter Wolfe conveys Bennett's originality, complexities of thought, and creative vigor while examining Bennett in his various roles as actor, director, playwright, and lyricist. As Wolfe illustrates, Bennett's success in his many spheres was no fluke. Bennett's theatrical eminence has been accompanied by awards and professional recognition. His play Single Spies won the Oliver Award as England's best comedy for 1989. The casts of his plays, starting with Forty Years On in 1968, have included such luminaries as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright,...

Understanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive reader's guide to the novels, short stories, and nonfiction written by one of Britain's most highly acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition, published in 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews, and criticism, as he maps the distinctive features of Martin Amis's imaginative landscape-the sociosexual satire of Money and Yellow Dog, the bold experimentation of Time's Arrow and Night Train, and the provocative blend of autobiography and cultural analysis in Experience and Koba the Dread. Diedrick...

Understanding Julian Barnes surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes's distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes's greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes's fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue...